


The Working Girl

by dilangley



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Abigail's arrival to camp, Arthur/John if you squint, Arthur/John/Abigail if you squint, Basically you just have to squint at this whole thing, Gen, Multi, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 21:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16900221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: “I’m thinking she’s just the type of girl we could use around here. Susan likes a hard worker, and girls who turn tricks always make more money than they cost,” Uncle piped up.Abigail Roberts joins the Van Der Linde gang.





	The Working Girl

**Author's Note:**

> No beta. Forgive me.

“You are not supposed to bring…” Dutch looked the woman up and down. “... ladies to camp. That’s what saloons are for.”

Arthur half-watched the spectacle from his seat by the fire. Uncle had returned to camp tonight, uncharacteristically sober, with a young woman on the back of his horse. Summoned by Mrs. Grimshaw, Dutch strode out of his tent to nip this in the bud. 

The rules of camp were simple and immovable: no outsiders.

Unless Dutch said so. All rules flexed under the thumb of wise Dutch van der Linde.

“I rescued her,” Uncle replied proudly. “Her name’s Anna.”

“Rescued her from what?” Hosea broke into the conversation now, rose from his place at the ledger. He laid his pen down carefully and pinched the bridge of his nose. Arthur knew working by firelight was no longer so easy on the old man’s eyes. Someone else needed to start handling the writing. 

“A client,” the young woman spoke for herself. Her voice neither trembled nor apologized, clear and strong and lovely. Arthur perked up. “I’m a working girl, and things got out of hand.”

“Come here, my dear,” Dutch said. He held out a hand and escorted her the few steps to his tent. Lifting up the lantern, he squinted at her. His face, illuminated by the harsh glow, was all Arthur could see.  “I can see. I am sorry for that.”

Dutch put an arm around her waist, drew her into him, and then released. He held his hand up with a pair of thick, expensive leather wallets. 

“I can also see you have a knack for taking what is not yours.”

“I don’t have many choices, sir. The world is a lot less cruel to a girl on her own who can pay her way.”

Arthur watched the familiar expression on Dutch’s face as he weighed her merit. Later, no matter what decision had been made, Dutch would try to explain it to them over a bottle of aged rum, try to make them see how he read goodness and mercy in a face, no matter how world-hardened its planes. Arthur would not understand much, John would understand less, and Hosea would wash his hands of the whole matter.

This time, Dutch saw something he worth saving in her face.

“Ms. Grimshaw, get this young lady a warm bowl and a cool rag. Madam, when you are cleaned up, come see me right here in this tent. We will decide your options together.”

Sometimes it went like that, with the women. Dutch always decided about the men on the spot, out in the thick of the action, choosing a fellow bandit with particular temerity or the lone wolf standing up in a home invasion. Sometimes it was a kid with an angry scowl and ten stolen dollars in his pocket telling a grown man to go to hell.

Arthur chuckled at the memory.

“I’m thinking she’s just the type of girl we could use around here. Susan likes a hard worker, and girls who turn tricks always make more money than they cost,” Uncle piped up. Arthur wondered how anyone could hang around camp as long as he had without being able to read a situation better than that; Dutch’s expression said it all. If this girl wanted to stay, she was going to have a tent within the hour.

“We don’t need another mouth to feed,” Ms. Grimshaw pointed out to no one in particular even as she set to work on the assigned task.

“She would take in the Devil himself if Dutch asked her to,” Hosea murmured. The two old-timers shared a look.

“I hear you both,” Dutch replied. He clapped his hands together and then outstretched them, a ruler bidding his people peace and wellbeing. “Now good night all. Get some sleep.”

The lanterns fell dark, and the fire crackled low enough that Arthur never did get a good look at Anna. He tossed and turned on his cot, eavesdropping on the conversations in shared spaces but unable to hear distinct words from Dutch’s closed tent.

  
  


\------------------

  
  


In the morning light, Arthur looked there first; the flaps hung open again, the cot inside held neither Dutch nor a mysterious girl. He made his way over the coffee pot, sniffed the acrid brew, and considered skipping it. Pearson’s mud was barely liquid enough to slide down his gullet. He stopped back in his tent at the shaving kit he had set up and leaned over the tiny, cracked, pocked mirror. His beard, regrown after a clean-shaven poker hustle, had only made it to sharp stubble. After a rub, he left it alone. John snored softly from his bedroll on the ground.

Arthur spotted the unknown figure at the fire, lifting one of the dirty tin mugs off the ground. He appraised her openly across the distance. Fair with hair black as crow’s wings and badly beaten by big hands: that much he saw at once on the shoulders bared in a working girl’s low-cut dress. The patchwork of bruises on her shoulders complemented the raw red laceration down her collarbone, the purple and black shining around her left eye.

He walked across to the fire with a mug in his hands.

“Any of the ones laying there ain’t been washed yet,” he said by way of a greeting. He held out his own. “The girls’ll get to ‘em today.”

He liked how she didn’t startle at his voice, just tilted her face up and looked right back at him. Up close like this, looking at him with big blue eyes and just a little wariness, she was younger than he thought. 

“Thanks,” she said. He filled the cup from the pot himself and then handed it to her.

“Sure.” He nodded. Uncharacteristic interest made him speak again. “You need anything?”

Now she did look surprised, turned those eyes on him and let the corner of her mouth twist sideways. “You don’t even know me.”

“Not what I asked.” 

“Damn, cowboy. A working girl never gets the good lines like that.” Her voice was cold.

Arthur flushed hot when he realized what she must see, a man sauntering up to a battered girl, thinking he can have her for only a cup of coffee and a few kind words. He opened his mouth to explain himself. 

“He’s not putting you on. He’s just like that,” John Marston’s voice came from somewhere behind him, two shades raspier than usual in its first use this morning. “Biggest son of bitch in the gang, but he means it.”

John had not buttoned his pants yet, just pulled them up over the legs of his Union suit and walked on out. He grabbed one of the dirty mugs off the ground, knowing full well they hadn’t been washed, and squinted at it. 

“This one’s mine,” he said before Arthur could say anything else. “It’s got a chip on it.”

Arthur shook his head. “Jesus.”

“You must be Dutch’s new girl. Javier said you got in last night before we got back,” John said. He looked over at Arthur and then back at Anna.

“I’m not…” She began, the first glimmer of worry in her eyes, and like a damn white knight, Arthur charged in.

“Shut the hell up, Marston.”

It wasn’t right for a girl who looked like she had been on the wrong end of a prizefight to be that beautiful, but when Anna smiled at Arthur just then, she was.

  
  


\--------------------

 

A week later, in the middle of the day, Jenny called out to Anna from the other side of camp, struggling with a heavy laundry tub. Arthur watched the moment of hesitation, a split second too long of no reaction, before Anna leaped into action to help, and it hit him.

From his seat on an upturned log, a book on his lap, Hosea had chuckled.

“‘Bout time you got there,” he said. Arthur shot him a sour look. “She’ll say more when she’s ready.”

In another week, she sheepishly told the camp that her name was Abigail Roberts, and she had planned on taking what she could from the communal funds and leaving as soon as she healed up. With her hands open in front of them, palms up and voice apologetic, she asked them for the permission she had already been given: to stay.

Dutch frowned, so Arthur spoke first in the silence. “I reckon none of us are going to judge you for casing us out first.”

Dutch hid his disapproval in a clap and a call for a round of drinks to celebrate Miss Roberts choosing her allegiance wisely.

That night, Abigail came to Arthur with gratitude in her eyes and a gentle request. Arthur tried to kick John out.

"You can sleep in the back of a wagon at full speed," Arthur said. "Go sleep in Davey's tent. Any tent."

"I'm already asleep," John muttered without rolling over. 

So that night, Arthur Morgan slept on the ground, a snoring John Marston on a bedroll to his right and a smiling Abigail Roberts snuggled under his blankets on his cot.

It was a long time before any of them tried to change the arrangement.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I'm working on an Arthur/John, and this kept itching at me, so I had to write it before I could continue with my other one.


End file.
